When Corinne Kratz first worked among the Okiek people in Kenya as an undergraduate in the mid-1970s, her parents gave her a camera. Wanting to document Okiek life as part of her research, she took photographs, which eventually grew into a collection of over 5,000 images. While completing her dissertation in Nairobi in 1988, she contemplated doing a photographic exhibit, an idea that expanded into a transnational traveling exhibit, Okiek Portraits. Traveling exhibits, of course, are never the same twice. As the exhibit changed and developed with each of its seven venues, so did Kratz’s insights about the nature of exhibition. She began jotting down her thoughts, which turned into this book. The book--like the photographic project itself--feels like something of a rolling stone that gets weightier and more interestingly textured as it gathers momentum. Indeed, the book represents quite a landmark--a probing, reflexive, insightful, and complex rumination on a range of topics including photography, visual anthropology, the nature of exhibition as a communicative medium, visitors’ varying engagements and understandings in museums, stereotypes and their persistence, and more. Yet Kratz continually weaves her discussions back to her two main topics of interest, namely exhibition communication and the politics of representation.

Surprisingly, the exhibit on which the book is based is relatively unassuming (and cleverly reproduced in the book). It includes 31 color photographs of Okiek people, individual and group portraits, a subject matter Kratz chose to create a sense of personal engagement for the viewer. The photographs, most of which were taken in the 1980s, are organized around a life-cycle theme. To each photo she added brief descriptive commentary in both of Kenya’s national languages: English and Kiswahili.

The individuals in the photographs are members of two groups of Okiek who live in west-central Kenya. Unlike most other Kenyans, whose livelihood is based on agriculture or pastoralism, the Okiek have, until recently, maintained a forest-based mode of subsistence in which they hunt wild game, make beehives, and collect honey. They are one of Kenya’s smallest ethnic groups, now numbering less than 25,000, and within Kenya remain relatively unknown. A slightly negative image of them as people who have no cattle persists, especially among their immediate neighbors, the Maasai.

Kratz’s intentions when originally staging the exhibit were sincere and unequivocal, namely to challenge stereotypes and disseminate information from her research to a general Kenyan audience. Her goal in writing the book was more complex. She hoped to spur “further critical reflection on exhibitions, the communication and politics of representation fundamental to them, and how understandings of identity and difference might be formed and changed through these processes” (p. 4).

An example of the type of complex critical reflection she engages in deals with exhibition text. When the exhibit opened at the National Museum in Nairobi in 1989, label copy included only Kratz’s descriptive commentary. When showing albums of the exhibit photos to the Okiek, however, she noticed the interest they took in the photos and audiotaped their comments. In order to make the exhibit more multilayered, she decided to include their commentary as captions at future venues (in Okiek and in English translation). Turning casual conversation into label copy raised issues about perspectives presented, languages used, and translation. Their comments (one example: “It’s Pilini that’s being married here. But where are the people who are bringing her? I say, aren’t we here, Cory?”) indicate that Okiek were not only looking at pictures of themselves but were also imagining others looking at their pictures.

As Kratz moves from the Nairobi venue and follows the exhibit through its U.S. venues, which include showings in natural history museums, university museums, and art galleries, she also reflects on the ways in which physical adjustments in the designed space create a totally different exhibit each time. She uses both these physical changes in the displays and the different audiences who viewed them as a springboard to explore how visitors engage with exhibits in varying ways, depending on what they bring to the museum experience. For example, in Kenya, stereotypes of Okiek were based entirely on ethnic distinctions. In the United States, however, Okiek were virtually unknown and the Kenyan ethnic-based stereotypes were irrelevant. Instead, visitors related through their own stereotypes of Africans that were rooted in ideas about race, not ethnicity. In the United States, Okiek were usually seen as representing all of Kenya or even Africa, which was a curious inversion of their minority status at home.

What is particularly refreshing about this book is the way in which Kratz combines probing theoretical insights with a demystification of the exhibitionary process and her role within it. She humbly starts the project with the question: “Could a small photographic exhibit make a difference?” (p. 104). But she later reveals, “Over time, as I worked on Okiek Portraits, I came to understand how naive (though not uncommon) a plan to change stereotypes merely by presenting more credible and realistic alternatives actually was” (p. 104). Kratz not only teaches us a great deal about the Okiek people and museum exhibition but also about the role of an anthropologist, as she moves through her research and explores every path down which it leads her. She begins by innocently looking through a camera lens at others. She ultimately turns the gaze back--intelligently, meticulously, and insightfully--on every imaginable aspect of the project.